There’s an odd little article in this morning’s Wall Street Journal called Dean Campaign Made Payments To Two Bloggers, by William M. Bulkeley and James Bandler, with Jeanne Cummings contributing. It turns out that when Governor Dean’s campaign hired Jerome Armstrong of MyDD and Kos of Daily Kos for consultation, they hoped that the prominent bloggers would also use their blogs to support the campaign. Surprise! The former-Dean-campaigner in question is Zephyr Teachout, improbably enough.
Your Humble Blogger wrote about blogger’s ethics a while ago, and one of my main points was that people expected, and could be expected to expect, a certain transparency. They certainly got that from both MyDD and DKos. Further, insofar as I think that there’s anything going on here, I suspect that the whole complicated transaction was as ethical as it could be, under the circumstances; the people paying money knew what they were paying for, the people getting money knew what they were being paid for, they all knew that they weren’t really going to get it, and the potential suckers knew that the campaign was trying to sucker them and that the bloggers weren’t playing along. Or were they?
The real coin that the Dean campaign was paying was relevance, and it was exactly the coin that both MyDD and DKos wanted, and that their readers wanted. I think that among the primary reasons Kos supported Gov. Dean was that Gov. Dean ‘got’ that bloggers were important; Kos and his readers wanted to believe that, and thus a candidate who persuaded him that he did (or at least that he would go along with a campaign manager who did) was likely to get their genuine support. The money was nearly irrelevant, except as a token of relevance.
I don’t mean this as a criticism of Mssrs Armstrong and Moulitsas. They weren’t suckered any more than I was by Rep. Gephardt “getting” labor, or some of my readers were by Rep. Kucinich “getting” peace. There certainly isn’t a scandal, here, particularly compared with a somewhat prominent columnist and television personality getting government money under the table to promote partisan policies. On the other hand, there is something there to chew on.
If, for instance, Tor were to hire me to do book reports for their site for a nominal fee, and I were to explain the sudden increase in Tor reports by transparently mentioning the transaction to my Gentle Readers, is there no ethical question left? Am I likely to think more highly of the books I get free than of books I have to buy? Is my belief that Tor has good judgment (in hiring me) likely to affect my belief in their editorial judgment? Am I likely to phrase negative reports more gently, on the chance of offending Tor editors? (Disclosure: After receiving a comment (possibly) from the author of a book I was reporting on, I do sometimes find myself considering the feelings of the author as I write reports.) Are my Gentle Readers likely to trust positive reviews of Tor books? Or negative reviews of competitors’ books?
I don’t think the analogy is completely without merit. Nor do I think that Mssrs Armstrong and Moulitsas are well-served by pretending that none of their readers (or perhaps more important their advertisers) has anything to worry about. I do think that they behaved more or less ethically, and I think an examination of how they acted and how people expected them to act will help them to act ethically in the future.
Thank you,
-Vardibidian.
UPDATE: a couple of hours later, after conversation with my Best Reader
A better example: the indispensable Nathan Newman is a labor lawyer as well as a blogger of some repute (ranking as a Large Mammal in the Truth Laid Bear’s Ecosystem). If, for instance, SEIU and AFSCME were fighting over influence within the AFL-CIO, it’s the sort of thing I would expect Mr. Newman to write about. In fact, I would go to his blog open to being persuaded to Mr. Newman’s point of view, particularly if I didn’t already have a strong position. Now, nobody necessarily cares if I go there open to Mr. Newman’s persuasion, but I suspect that Mr. Newman is respected by people with substantial influence in local and national union councils. I certainly hope he is.
Now, if SEIU’s partisan’s are aware of this, and they ought to be, it might well occur to them to spend a little money getting his legal advice on one or another of the lawsuits they are involved in. They would pay him well for that service (and there’s no reason to believe they wouldn’t get their money’s worth), and while talking about their business, they might well take him out to lunch and chat a bit about the upcoming kerfuffle with AFSCME, which would be on their minds, anyway.
Now, Mr. Newman might well return to his computer and blog about that lunch, and pass along some inside dope, as well as his own ruminations about that. In fact, it’s just what I would want him to do. And, as it happens, it’s just what the hypothetical fellahs at SEIU would want him to do, and what they think they are really paying for.
So, you tell me, Gentle Reader: is there no ethical situation to talk about?
Thanks,
-V.